On a crisp, sunny morning a couple of official vehicles, including a police car, pull into a quiet cul-de-sac in a seaside town. Officers get out and knock on the door of one of the houses, then proceed to search it: every cupboard is opened, every box. Old furniture is pulled out of the garage. The officers, who are from both London and the local council, and are funded by National Trading Standards, scour the property, hunting for illegal skin-lightening products imported from Asia and Africa. Jars are bagged and tagged while the inhabitants of the house are interviewed. These products will be sent to a lab and tested. If they meet legal requirements, they will be returned. If they don’t, they will be destroyed, and a formal criminal prosecution will begin.

Not all products that purport to lighten the skin are illegal, but many creams from outside the EU contain chemicals banned under safety regulations. These include mercury and hydroquinone – which with prolonged use are linked to poisoning, skin damage and liver and kidney malfunction – and corticosteroids, which in the UK are prescription-only products. Misuse of corticosteroid creams is associated with thinning of the skin, an increased chance of skin cancer and, counterintuitively, darkening of the skin.

This raid has taken place toward the end of a year-long campaign to put a dent in the sales of dangerous cosmetics online. Southwark Trading Standards is leading the nationwide initiative, using officers who have been tackling the sale of illegal skin-lightening products in hotspot market areas such as Peckham, south London, since the mid-90s. But as internet marketplaces have grown, so local work solely focusing on retail – namely, specialist ethnic stores – was no longer enough. National organisation was needed, and so, in 2017, a taskforce was assembled.

Paul Gander, the team leader at Southwark Trading Standards, says the work often involves the cooperation of a number of government agencies as well as private companies such as eBay and Paypal. Officers scan the websites, issuing warnings to sellers circumventing the rules and working with the marketplaces to block listings containing suspect product names. But sellers are quick to adopt new tactics, from using code words to misrepresenting products. “Anecdotally,” says Gander, “since hydroquinone was banned [in 2001] – and it’s been banned in more and more countries – we’ve seen more sales of seemingly legal products that contain alternatives such as kojic acid. But quite often they’re not accurately described – they do contain hydroquinone. Or they contain other potent ingredients.”

Zara, 29, a fashion buyer from London, recalls unmarked jars being sent to her as a teenager from relatives in Pakistan. “They didn’t come with any information on ingredients or health implications,” she says. “The general consensus was that the end goal – lighter skin – was so desired [the products should be used] in blind faith.” Zara already had a fair complexion and was under pressure to maintain it. She describes rigorous skincare routines of creams and home remedies such as rubbing raw lemons into the skin and wearing turmeric masks, as well as keeping out of the sun. “I would be pitted against my darker-skinned cousin as the ‘prettier one’, which equipped me with the wrong notions of beauty when entering puberty and the wider world. I recall never wanting to wear white or light colours for fear it would make me appear darker among my peers.”

As an adult, Zara became tired of the “colonial attitude that ‘white is right’” and pushed back against her family, questioning the practice for her and younger relatives, but says she recognises that, throughout her life, she has “benefited from skin privilege”.

“The internet is the great battleground,” says Steve Garner, the head of criminology and sociology at Birmingham City University, who last year undertook the first British sociological study into skin-lightening. Garner’s sample was small; respondents willing to speak openly about their usage were hard to come by, even in a city as ethnically diverse as Birmingham. But there were nonetheless some striking findings. The first was the age at which respondents took up skin-lightening – 16 to 24 – and the second was the role the internet played.

“The internet’s role is primarily two things: the information and the image,” says Garner. That image is almost invariably the archetypal before and after pic – the sad, dark-skinned person against the smiling, light-skinned person – touted both by big brands and by individuals posting about their skin-lightening journey. “I often saw discussions between people who are, say, based in the UK, saying: ‘You should get the American version of a particular product because the rules are slightly different in the States,’ for example,” he says. “You can find the loopholes, you just have to subscribe to their forums.”

And these forums form a vital part of a skin-lightening subculture – an anonymised community for committed skin-lighteners. To the most evangelical, lightening is a way of life, one that involves eating a set diet, avoiding the sun and keeping to a meticulous daily skin-care regime, not to mention taking pills and injections. The forums are a hub for users to showcase their progression, troubleshoot and encourage each other, while having a safe space to discuss lightening culture. They have their own lingua franca – skin tone is described by code (eg NC10) pulled from the Mac makeup palette, for instance – and users regularly set others challenges to get to a tone by a set date. One forum, SkinCareTalk, hosts almost 450,000 posts discussing skin-lightening. Some make for troubling reading. “I’ve ruined my skin and don’t know what to do. I can’t stop crying,” reads one entry. “I had acne scars on my face so I decided to use lightening products … but it made my face darker. I feel so lost. I’m so depressed.” “I used [hydroquinone] and messed my face up, help,” reads another. One user asks for advice after glutathione pills have caused them to break out in hives, while another kicks off a discussion about how to deal with friends or relatives “jealous” of their skin.

Fraink White with one of his products. Photograph: Silton Buendia/Barcroft Images

On YouTube, skin-lightening videos regularly accrue several million views, with the most popular being those from vloggers who focus on the use of products with natural or natural-sounding ingredients, either made at home or created by pharmaceutical companies. “I would never, ever recommend harsh whitening products,” says Jyoti Singh, AKA SuperPrincessJo, a beauty blogger from India who lives in Singapore, whose skin-lightening clips regularly attract millions of views. “People [can] have [a] desperate need to be whiter faster, so any recommendations can cause side-effects if used in excess or wrongly. So, I only share natural remedies that are safer.”

Garner is sceptical about whether the products purporting to be natural should be viewed differently, suggesting it is merely a matter of sales language. “People used to say skin ‘bleaching’, but it’s such a loaded term now. Instead, people use the neutral ‘lightening’, and increasingly common is the appetising ‘brightening’, which was pushed heavily by the major companies.”

Fraink White started lightening his skin when he was a teenager, using a variety of products including those with, as he describes it, “dangerous” ingredients such as hydroquinone. He began his YouTube channel to share his findings, warts and all, reviewing these items. “I did one recently where my face puffed up for days, it was awful. I’ve had some terrible results from products, even ones that have been FDA-approved.” Unlike many high-profile lightening vloggers, who largely hail from Asia, White is African American. He has become a kind of an internet posterboy for the practice, regularly arguing his position everywhere from Fox to the Daily Mail.

“Just because I lighten my skin, does not mean I want to be white,” he says, although he concedes that some people may want to lighten their skin to distance themselves from their race. “I still look African American by my features, I’m not trying to change that. I just want to return my skin to the colour and texture of the skin usually covered by clothing which is less exposed to the sun. That’s my natural colour.”

White launched his own skincare line recently, which he claims is “all-natural”, and says sales are on the up. “I think the taboos around skin-lightening are being broken. This is why I started my channel in the first place, to break the taboos and show people that there are natural, safe ways to take care of your skin, not just in lightening but in general. I wanted to help people stop using dangerous methods to achieve their skincare goals.” It is striking, however, that White’s most popular video is one where he recommends hydrogen peroxide, for “fast” results.

“There’s a very small public-health presence online in relation to skin-lightening,” says Garner. “So, the people discussing products, and selling the products, completely dominate this subject. If you wanted to counter these ideas using the internet, it would be daunting.”

But counter-movements have begun. In February2016, Pax Jones, an activist and photographer based in Texas, woke up to find that photos she had taken of her Sri Lankan classmates showing dark-skinned beauty, and tagged with #UnfairandLovely, had gone viral (the tag is a play on one of South Asia’s most renowned skin-lightening creams, Fair and Lovely). People joined in, sharing their pictures of dark-skinned beauty. The campaign made international news. “One day I woke up and saw literally thousands and thousands of people tweeting about it,” Jones recalls. “Lupita Nyong’o even posted about it.”

Jones recently revived the #UnfairandLovely slogan as part of an internet campaign highlighting the dangers of skin-lightening, and tackling colourism as a concept. The campaign is mindful of national and historical nuances – caste system, slavery or colonialism – and is careful to organise content focusing on specific communities. “I’m black, my friends were Sri Lankan, and so we had shared experiences. But people’s experiences with colourism vary a lot and it’s very difficult to get someone who was raised in India to relate to colourism in Jamaica. It’s like the products. The chemicals may be the same, but the marketing is the dangerous part. Our campaign took off with South Asian people because they recognised the brand name. But black people are using brands with other names.”

The image of unsafe, often black-market chemicals lathered on unsuspecting skin may provoke disapproval, but many of the users are responding to real and urgent pressures in their lives.

“I understand some people oppose skin-lightening,” says Singh. “But there are a vast amount of girls out there who desperately need solutions. Sometimes the video requests I get have their personal stories, so when I share natural remedies I think: how will these help those women who suffer with societal pressures of looking better each day.”

White says: “People are thinking way too deeply about this. Some just think: ‘I’d look better 15lbs lighter with a narrower nose.’ That’s it. They’re not thinking about race. Everybody in their head has a 2.0 version of themselves that looks the best, it doesn’t mean that they hate themselves.” But Garner asks: “Why is the one with lighter skin always the best version of yourself? There’s something underpinning that, clearly, at societal level.”

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In a study published in the journal Health Care Analysis, Herjeet Marway, a global ethics lecturer at the University of Birmingham, posited a hypothetical scenario in which parents were able to genetically determine that their unborn child would be fair-skinned. Would it be ethical, given the advantages fairer-skinned people receive, to do so? “My argument is no, because there is such a thing as harm beyond the individual,” she says. “Though the child may have a better life, others will see that they are getting all these benefits and it pressures others to change themselves to compete. It effectively reinforces and underwrites broad hierarchies about race and colour.”

She argues that exactly the same argument applies to the actions of global companies. “Given their size, resources and influence, there are ethical standards to which they should be held. This includes not being complicit in prejudicial practices. Adverts for cosmetics have infamously presented darker-skinned women as failures compared with lighter-skinned women. Colourism existed long before these companies, but they commodify it and sell it. These companies are able to change and it is something we might reasonably ask of them.”

In some ways, challenging the practice of skin-lightening on the basis of skin damage is a lost cause as users will so often believe that the aimed-for benefits will outweigh the dangers. “Marginalised people are often expected to change their decisions and only think about the greater good,” says Jones. “But sometimes the individual can see the benefits to them as superseding everything else. And I think that’s actually very valid.”

Back in the cul-de-sac, it’s a successful bust. Trading standards seize between 1,500 and 2,000 products, including some homemade, non-labelled and untested products, taking out one of the most prolific online sellers in the UK. At the close of the year-long nationwide initiative, 45 traders had been identified, and 23 received warnings; there were two convictions and tens of thousands of pounds in fines and victim compensation. There are more prosecutions to come, but globally, business is still booming. And here? Well, trading standards will probably be busy for some time to come.